It floored me when I first read it, and even now it’s worthy of one very special word:

Wow.

If Dionne is right, then the era of free-market everything is waning. And not a day too soon. Free market ideas, as opposed to fair market ideas, led to some meetings between myself and my former insurance company turned investment banker and purveyor of mostly-legal conflicts of interest, State Farm. Deregulation enabled the housing crisis and permitted the fraud that was Enron and the California energy crisis. Cutting capital gains taxes led directly to massive disparities in income growth, but those supposed entrepreneurs at the top didn’t trickle their windfall profits down to job growth at the middle and lower income levels. And, of course, deregulation of media led to massive consolidation, short-term profit-driven cuts in correspondents and editorial staff, and the radically wrong idea that “the public interest is whatever the public is interested in.”

Give Dionne’s piece a read. When a free marketeer from the Hudson Institute calls for new regulations, well, either conservative free market ideology is about to be replaced, or the Ghost Busters containment unit is about to be turned off, Gozer released, and the Stay Puffed marshmallow man turned loose on New York.

This is their whole gig. They talk about “free markets”, “evil government” but when a Company they favor is in trouble, they pull out all the stops. Just a few minutes ago in a press conference, President Idiot still thinks that “tax cuts” have helped the economy grow

It’s worse than that, actually – when a company they dislike is doing well, they’re also pulling out all the stops to screw them over. Think Kevin Martin of the FCC with respect to cable companies – he’s all for deregulation and media consolidation, except for when it might benefit Comcast et al, and then he’s all for more regulation.

Not all conservatives are like this, thankfully. But most of the leaders of the GOP these days aren’t conservatives in any way, shape, or form, and these people have raised hypocrisy to a fine art (so have many of the Democratic party leaders too, unfortunately).